~ an enthusiastic meddler exploring photography

Film Test – part 3

Now for another black and white film – ADOX CHS 25 ART. This film is probably almost as far away from the Delta 3200 as you can get; it’s very slow and very fine grained. This is the kind of film that probably suits me a lot of the time as I’m generally interested in detail, and I’m usually not worried about light.
As an aside, the 120 rolls came in plastic containers like 35mm canisters rather than just a foil wrap like most 120 films. This isn’t really essential, but it is handy to have a few of these around.
So I started the roll with some close-up shots using the bellows including, I think, my first true macro (i.e. better than 1:1) with the Bronica, of a snail shell I found in the garden. Now this goes against the “not worried about light” statement I made above so if I was going to do more of those I’d need to find some extra illumination, because viewed closely there’s a bit of shutter vibration. However the in-focus detail is very high showing all the tiny pitting and texture of the shell.

Out in the forest the film also performed well, with heaps of detail and some rich tones. As I recall, this was taken on a bright but hazy morning so there were no deep shadows, but there was weak sunlight reflecting off the water, which comes out well. The little slice of water in the lower left is deliciously silvery. So there’s plenty of range in the negative and plenty of detail. The grain is certainly fine, even developed in Rodinal, although a comparison with some similarly developed Pan F+ seems to show that the Ilford product actually performs better in that regard. I only have the one developer so I can’t test whether the result would be different with some other chemicals, but it’s not what I was expecting.

So I’m left thinking I need to shoot a few more rolls of this and see how it stacks up against Pan F in more situations. As, if it’s slower than Pan F and grainier, then its only virtue so far is its slight price advantage.